Bishop Hill Know your enemy
Feb 27, 2009 Nanny state Politicians Frank Field, writing in the Mail, reminisces about his meetings with Margaret Thatcher while she was PM. It contained this interesting point, which rather seems to support my pet theory that it is the civil service which is the real enemy:
There wasn’t much in her record as Education Secretary in Edward Heath’s Government to suggest she would be a great Prime Minister.
But when she entered No10 she understood she had to get control of the Whitehall machine – and not be bypassed by it, as had occurred with so many of her predecessors.
There's no doubt that both Blair and Brown have been unable to introduce any meaningful reform of Leviathan. They have been ignored by the mandarins and have proved powerless to do anthing about it. The country is therefore left with the slender hope that David Cameron can do any better.
Oh dear.
Perhaps our best hope for salvation lies in a sudden collapse of government finances, sweeping aside the whole state edifice overnight. Painful, perhaps, but quick and decisive.
Reader Comments (5)
LEAs? Abolish them. The HSE? Abolish it. The Foresty Commission? Abolish it. BERR? Abolish it. The BBC licence fee? Abolish it - let the pinkos compete for their revenue with everyone else.
The list could carry on for hundreds of pages, so I won't bore everyone by continuing.
Put these actions together with a cessation of advertising publicly funded jobs in the Guardian & we could slash our deficits & re-define the centre of British politics for generations to come. The leftist long march through state institutions has been spectacularly successful - so much so most are now beyond reform & do more harm that any good they ever did.
They have simply ignored it, creating their own ways of doing things.
Read "The Triumph of the Political Class" for an expose. It's brilliant. Suddenly all sorts of things make sense, such as the sheer bloody incompetence of NuLab.
I imagine that by any ordinary measure, that has already happened. I've no idea where all this bale-out money is coming from, unless they've already fired up the presses at the Royal Mint.
Meanwhile, our local council (Isle of Wight) remains blissfully confident that its grand programme of road and school building can press ahead with a mixture of government and PFI funding! It would be funny if it wasn't so tragic.